Bernard Schoenburg: Schock calls health-care law ripoff’ of young people

Sunday

Dec 29, 2013 at 1:12 AM

U.S. Rep. AARON SCHOCK, R-Peoria, used a national platform last weekend to deliver a message that he thinks the Affordable Care Act is a “ripoff” because it will make young people pay too much to support insurance of older folks.

Schock delivered the weekly Republican address — the GOP’s forum as President BARACK OBAMA, similar to other presidents in recent years, provides a weekly weekend comment.

Obama used his Dec. 21 weekly address to praise Congress for passage of a bipartisan budget deal designed to keep the government operating for two years.

“So after a year of showdowns and obstruction that only held back our economy, we’ve been able to break the logjam a bit over the last few weeks,” Obama said. “It’s a hopeful sign that we can end the cycle of short-sighted, crisis-driven decision-making and actually work together to get things done.”

The president did note that more than a million people will lose unemployment benefits a few days after Christmas, and asked that members of Congress “restore that lifeline immediately, then put their entire focus on creating more good jobs that pay good wages” when they come back from their break.

Schock, now 32 and still one of the youngest members of Congress, used Eureka College — east of Peoria and where President RONALD REAGAN went to college — as the backdrop for his video in which he said the federal and state ad campaigns to get people to sign up for health insurance don’t tell the whole story.

“No matter how many actors and rappers and rock stars the president rolls out, the best sales pitch in the world can’t sell a bad product,” Schock said. “And this health-care law is a bad product for young people.

“How bad? Well, typically, based on health and age, it costs about six times more to insure a 64-year-old than it does an 18-year-old,” Schock said. “The health-care law, however, says that insurance companies can only charge their most expensive customers three times what they do their cheapest customers. In other words, they are forced by law to shift the cost of older and sicker patients onto young people. And the president needs a lot of young people — about 2.7 million — to enroll so he can shift the costs onto them and keep premiums from skyrocketing.

“In Washington, they call this ‘community rating,’ but where I come from, we call it a ripoff,” Schock said.

“Young people helped put the president in office,” Schock continued, “and with this health-care law, he’s pushing them into years of less choice, fewer opportunities and larger bills.”

He said the law should be scrapped, and young people should “pay their fair share for health care, and nothing more. And instead of Washington telling us what to buy, let’s get back to letting every American choose the plan that’s best for them and their family.”

In seeking response, I contacted JIM DUFFETT of Champaign, executive director of the Campaign for Better Healthcare, a consumer advocacy group that supports the Affordable Care Act.

Cost-shifting has long been part of health care, Duffett said, with people with insurance covering costs of the uninsured, and insurance company profits sometimes higher than needed. People of different ages get different services and procedures, he said, and premiums from all help pay the bills.

“Unfortunately, Aaron’s kind of ‘divide and separate’ strategy is counter-intuitive to the nature of this country, that … we all have to work together as one nation,” Duffett said. “We’ve been dealing with cost-shifting for decades and decades, and what at least this does is begin to level the playing field for everybody.”

Duffett noted that while he is critical of Schock’s speech, he’s also been critical of leadership of the Illinois House — run by Democrats — because the state did not set up its own exchange for sign-ups under the new health law.

Democrats ROB MELLON of Quincy and DARRELL MILLER of Danvers are in the Democratic primary in the 18th Congressional District to take on Schock.

Mellon said the “vast majority” of Americans support parts of the Affordable Care Act, including the part that allows people up to age 26 — including most students at Eureka, he surmised — to stay on their parents’ insurance.

“This is about campaigning for him,” Mellon, a Quincy Senior High history teacher and captain in the Army Reserve, said of the Schock address. “It’s not about finding solutions.”

Karen McDonald, Schock’s political director, said that during debate on the health care law, Republicans did offer solutions including delaying the individual mandate a year to match the delay for businesses, expanding high-risk pools and expanding tax credits for low-income individuals to buy insurance.

“Republicans have offered numerous fixes,” McDonald said.

Anderson retires

DAVE ANDERSON, 67, who was with the Illinois State Bar Association for 39 years, retired from his post as associate executive director, overseeing communications, this month.

He called his time there an “amazing experience.” He thinks that when he was one of about 80 applicants who interviewed for a job at the association in 1974, his 11 years in radio helped him stand out.

A Harrisburg native, Anderson started on radio in his hometown, and moved to stations in Marion and Decatur before joining WTAX in Springfield in 1971. When WDBR went on the air a year later, he was its first news director.

While he’s spent nearly four decades working for the statewide lawyers’ group, Anderson never got a college degree himself. He did take some classes at campuses including what is now the University of Illinois Springfield.

“It’s been from Day 1 just an uplifting experience,” Anderson said of his time at the bar association, “and I’ve learned very quickly that there are a lot of lawyers that you really can look up to who are involved in leadership of the association.”

Anderson and his wife, ELIZABETH, have three grown children and three grandchildren, all of them living in Springfield. Anderson said he looks forward to “being less busy for a while,” but he also has “some new possibilities for keeping involved in things.”

In my decades of working with Anderson, I’ve found him to be someone who knows the material, explains it well and understands deadline pressure. That’s a good combination.

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